Show HN: A search engine tailored for news
thefactual.com
thefactual.com
We rank individual news articles for how informative and objective they are using a variety of signals that proxy expertise: depth and extent of research (links, quotes), neutral tone of writing, historical topic focus and ratings of journalist, and source reputation. We overlay political bias ratings and select multiple highly informative articles across the political spectrum on each topic. We also give additional context like read time, and make it easy to filter out paywalled articles.
More on how it works here: https://www.thefactual.com/how-it-works.
Feedback/questions appreciated. Thanks!
I'd say on topics like abortion the "truth is out there" just like it is in title sequence of the X files... That is, there is no truth at all. The main sin of this kind of news coverage is that it fills a very limited agenda and displaces other things, secondarily it stirs people up emotionally and keeps them watching, donating to candidates and political advocacy organizations and other things that ultimately disenfranchise and disempower people.
The #1 bias in the news media is "if it bleeds it leads", #2 is the proliferation of pseudo-events
1. We do not enforce an equal number of articles from all sides of the political spectrum. We use the political lean ratings only to help identify different framings on topics so people can see different angles to a story because issues are complex and no single article will have all the facts.
2. We agree that media skews towards outrage because it funds their advertising based business model. That's why our ratings emphasize the most objective and least opinionated writing. And thankfully, there is a lot of great writing that is trying to inform, rather than emotionally manipulate people. It's hard to find which is why we built such a search engine.
3. News orgs are eager to keep publishing stories even if the topics are not that important because they want more of your attention. That's why we group articles by topics on our site (factual.news) so that you can actually "finish reading the news". Oh, we're also ad-free and don't care to keep you longer than absolutely necessary.